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This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (1967) [video]
- rgrieselhuber 5y agoMcLuhan's dissertation, "The Classical Trivium," is well worth the read: https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Trivium-Place-Thomas-Learning/dp/1584232358/ https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Trivium-Place-Thomas-Learni...
- dredmorbius 5y agoTIL, thanks! You might be able to find a copy at a library. It's not at Archive.org / OpenLibrary or LibGen. Yet. https://www.worldcat.org/title/classical-trivium-the-place-of-thomas-nashe-in-the-learning-of-his-time/oclc/456181921 https://www.worldcat.org/title/classical-trivium-the-place-o...
- aspenmayer 5y agoI can confirm that a 223.28 MB PDF on Z-Library seems to be the work in question. (ISBN 1-58423-067-3) Their clearnet URLs are down right now, but the TOR link is up. http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhembyd.onion http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem...
- dredmorbius 5y agoMany thanks.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Schiendelman 5y agoAnd now, increasingly, the tribe is the message, and each tribe aligns with their own medium.
- the-dude 5y agoEven if this were true, it is nothing new : in The Netherlands after WWII every religious / political fraction had its own public broadcast group ( channels / stations are shared ), schools, sport clubs, news papers, labor unions etc. There was even a word for it : verzuiling [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation
- Schiendelman 5y agoWhat’s new is that the tribes can grow worldwide without physical interaction.
- Fricken 5y agoMarshall McLuhan had some things to say about "peer to peer electronic media" in the 1970s, and amongst was a concern that it would provoke tribalism.
- Schiendelman 5y agoYes! And Neil Postman carried on those ideas.
- gabrielsroka 5y agoTypo, it should be "The Medium Is the Massage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
- mdp2021 5y agoCorrect for a technicality... «There are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age» (Marshall McLuhan) Linked by the submitter is the video; the text is at https://archive.org/details/Marshall.Mcluhan..The.Medium.Is.The.Massage.2001 https://archive.org/details/Marshall.Mcluhan..The.Medium.Is....
- dang 5y agoIt's more fun and interesting than that - here's the full quote: Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover 'Massage'. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!' Now there are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age. I've 'massaged' the title above - seems most in McLuhan's spirit.
- ambrose2 5y agoBefore smartphones were ubiquitous I had trouble convincing folks that had only heard of the book that the title was in fact “The Medium is the Massage”, they were convinced I was the one who had it wrong.
- dang 5y agoImagine what the people watching it on NBC in 1967 must have thought! Well worth reading: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan https://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan
- mdp2021 5y agoThe medium was supposed a soothing massage, and nowadays in some regions/channels the elicited emotion is, panic (Consistently with the text: «Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools - with yesterday's concepts.»)
- kordlessagain 5y agoSee a YouTube video titled “This video will make you angry.”
- gdubs 5y agoFirst read this in the early 2000s in college and honestly didn’t quite grasp it. Revisited it later, and still didn’t quite grasp it. Was only a few years back, when I looked at social media through the lens of the book that I finally got the “ah ha” moment. I can’t say how much it holds up overall, but it’s definitely mind-expanding.
- briga 5y agoMcLuhan isn't really an author to grasp so much as he is an author to be grasped by. He's often difficult to understand but I think the point isn't so much to understand so much as, like you said, to expand your mind to new possibilities. His most powerful writing has an aphoristic, koan-like quality designed more to be provocative than to say anything specific. This can be mildly infuriating but at its best it's visionary stuff.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoPhilosophy is arguably better conducted showing rather than telling. Plato did this by asking questions, others do it with poetry. It's easy to construct refined models of the world, but it ultimately isn't particularly useful and readers often get lost in this world of ideas and end exploring things they've been told rather than things they've seen. You eventually end up with something akin to scholasticism. Once you start to notice it, we use a lot of very complicated terms and ideas in our daily language, but it's often not immediately obvious what we mean. I often come across people talk about ideas as though they had wishes and intents. Peculiar thing. Anyway I don't think adding onto that pile of long complicated words makes the situation better.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoTom Leykis, who was basically the Howard Stern of LA in the late 90s/2000s, gave a good interpretation of McLuhan. He saw (in his case) talk radio's typical audience as a father who's outside on a ladder cleaning his gutters listening to a radio that's face down in the lawn so he only hears every 4th or so word. Taking that into account, he modeled his cadence and his entire radio show (and later his call-in podcast show) around that kind of premise.
- Der_Einzige 5y agoI am sorry to have to write this comment as reading the works of Marshall McLuhan or other hack-ish folks like him can upon the first read feel illuminating. I felt the same way when first reading Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guttari, Micheal Foucault, or Lacan, or Derrida. After a cursory rereading at an age older than 18, I realized how badly I had been deceived. I just do not buy this idea of "hyperreality", or that somehow media representations meaningfully "distort reality". Actually, the gulf war DID happen (Baudrillard thinks that it didn't because of the media). The map is NOT the territory. The medium is NOT the message (or even a "massage", but maybe a "mass age"). I do not deny that a medium has impact on the message, but this notion of it being identical or even worth speaking about as though they are identical is so alien and absurd to me I cannot even figure out where it started. I will give credit to Marshall Mcluhan for not writing in an insufferable or "fashionable nonsense" style like the others I have compared him to. He is a fine but definitely overrated author.
- handrous 5y agoMy grasp on "the medium is the message" is that it's in part a technological-determinism argument. The message a medium will convey, or perhaps the space of messages it may end up conveying in practice, is determined by the nature of the medium itself—how it's created, how it's distributed, how it's experienced—resisting attempts to use it for other purposes. That aspect of it, at least, seems useful and to have some truth to it.
- u385639 5y agoThis is interesting - provoking. Can you share some authors/material that has influenced your awakening, so to speak?
- pphysch 5y agoI agree with the GP; my view is that virtually all 20th/21st century philosophers dug up classical German/Western philosophy from its grave and made their careers out of it. That philosophy had nowhere to go, so its adherents could take it anywhere in the service of their -- to be frank -- grifting. All it takes is a clever tongue capable of generating "fashionable nonsense" and a lack of intellectual integrity (see: Sokal hoax). Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) by Friedrich Engels, published after the death of Karl Marx, is one of the best summaries of the late development of classical German philosophy in particular. It's written in a fairly accessible style as long as you grok the Hegelian/Marxist idealist/materialist definitions. This revolution in Western thought is best summarized by Marx in his final Thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." The upshot is that the best way to understand writers/philosophers like McLuhan is rather to understand their audience. Which bits of "fashionable nonsense" is sticking, and how does this reflect the conditions and interests of the audience? Presume market forces before presuming intellectual rigor.
- aasasd 5y agoTIL the original book was published in '64—kinda surprised to learn that, because by that time experiments with mediums were already quite widespread, particularly in literature (afaik): e.g. Principia Discordia, ‘published’ in '63. Pretty sure that suprematism and constructivism from the '15s and '20's were steps in this direction, and by the time of brutalism and general mid-century modernism, things were in full swing. Take Swiss modernism in print design: it's hard to not get the message. By now, of course, the sentiment has permeated the culture—so in the recent discussion on Codex Seraphinianus, the comments immediately derail it to works that are ‘weird’ but play with the form at least as much as the content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413428
- bullen 5y agoThe old media is the content until the new medium discovers it's own content, not possible in previous mediums. The global action 3D MMO that is built and modified by the user is the USP of the final medium: programming the internet!
- ngcc_hk 5y agoI suspect it is not the content within that matters. It is the media that matter. It is not what electricity drive but the very electricity infrastructure that matters.
- bullen 5y agoWell yes electricity is the medium, but the media still has importance. I think my comment would be more logical if you replace medium with media? Learned something new today: https://www.shmoop.com/grammar/spelling/media-vs-medium https://www.shmoop.com/grammar/spelling/media-vs-medium Thx!
- dang 5y agoOne past thread: This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (1967) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404250 - April 2015 (27 comments)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- marttt 5y agoUbuWeb has also collected interviews and other audio gems about/featuring McLuhan, including two tracks from the late 1960s Columbia Records' LP "The Medium is the Massage": https://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html https://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html And there's also a 1999 documentary film about McLuhan entitled "Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan": https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan.html https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan.html Years ago, I would spend hours browsing UbuWeb. What a treasure trove! It also pays to point out that while the site was launched in 1996 (by artist-poet Kenneth Goldsmith), its UI has remained more or less the same since about 2005.
- dang 5y agoIt is an incredible site. That documentary is watchable via https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan_orbit.html https://ubu.com/film/mcluhan_orbit.html. I intend to. Thanks!
- Merrill 5y ago"Retina" LCDs and high quality earbuds have turned the internet into a "hot" medium, which causes recipients to believe the messages they are receiving. This puts society in a different position than previously when broadcast analog video was the prime media, and its noise and low definition made messages less believable and encouraged skepticism. TV was a "cold" medium. The hot internet is more like the hot broadcast radio and wired audio of the '20s and '30s during the rise of the great totalitarian regimes.
- krylon 5y agoThis reminds me of that Sopranos episode where there is a US Marshall named McLuhan. A nurse notices and asks, "So that makes you 'Marshall McLuhan'?", but the Marshall doesn't get it. (Neither did I at the time, to be fair.)